Angry Birds knows where you live

Angry Birds on iPhone one of many popular apps that shares your exact location with advertisers, in spite of two thirds of us being against the idea

A new report has disclosed startling evidence that a huge number of popular apps are sharing your data more widely than you might expect.

One of the most startling finds by the company was just how many advertising domains were contacted while some apps are running, with some apps such as Angry Birds getting in contact with four domains on the iPhone version and eight domains on Android.

Ciaran Bradley VP for Handset Security puts it down to a lack of proper explanation by the app developers themselves: "I think the big thing is that people just aren’t aware that it’s going on, they’ve thought ‘OK I see advertising say if I’m using Angry Birds appearing in the right hand pane’ but they would never give a second thought to exactly how that advertising is getting there or what information is being sent to those advertisers."

"When you’re downloading an application there quite often aren’t any terms and conditions that you can accept or if there are they’re just too un-wieldy."

The report from Adaptive Mobile also found that although the clear majority of us are completely against the idea of apps sharing our information we continue to use these apps with 75 per cent of us giving away our locations during the download.

Of course this doesn't mean that every advertising domain contacted is a 'big bad wolf' as Bradley goes on to explain: "Some of it is advertising and some of those are analytics companies that allow the developer to track who's using their applications, how they’re using it, every time we turn it on for example the analytics firms will be contacted. I think the big thing for consumers is that most of the advertising domains that are contacted are completely legit in the terms that you would have heard of them, they’re big companies like Google."

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